Race-Bait and Switch

For years, it has been ridiculously obvious that the Beltway media simply cannot function without the crutch of its Both Sides Do It lie.  

Cannot.  

Function.  

Period.

And for this I blame Chuck Todd, and a boatload of others just like him*, for reasons that -- believe me -- after 11 years, I get tired of reiterating.  But until I get Mr. Todd and his collaborators under some hot lights and sweat the details of his part in the Beltway media conspiracy out of them, nailing the same painfully obvious theses to the media's cathedral door over and over and over again is the best I've got.

This radical media bias in favor of a comforting fairy tale was never particularly well-hidden because it didn't need to be:  virtually no one inside the belly of the media beast -- people whose chosen profession ostensibly has something to do with speaking the truth -- is going to risk their position by speaking this obvious truth out loud.

But after years of maintaining the Big Both Siderist Lie by lending its tattered mantle of respectability to an increasingly dangerous and bizarre gallery of Conservative lunatics and con men in order to achieve "balance", the Beltway media finally arrived at the place it was headed all along:  with a Republican Party which was now so openly and confidently racist and insane that there is no possibility of wishing it away any longer.   Or, as Brother Charlie Pierce puts it:

One of our two major political parties has nominated a megalomaniacal know-nothing for the highest office in the land. He is demonstrably racist, demonstrably unfit for the office, and very nearly demonstrably cuckoo bananas. That is the only story anybody should be covering, and there is no Other Side to it. Both Sides do not nominate Donald Trumps. Elite American political journalism is either unwilling or unable to accept the obvious truth of this.

The Irresistible Force of the Donald Trump nomination had finally collided with the Immovable Object of the Beltway Both Siderist Lie.  And the existential consequences have been both disturbing and hilarious -- fodder for several dozen more essays than I have the time or spirit to write.

One of the most deleterious side-effects of Donald Trump's candidacy has been the mainstreaming of America's more quotidian racism and commonplace right-wing crackpottery that are usually cranked up to "8"*, but are being smuggled into respectability under the cover of being slightly less awful than Trump, who cranks it up to "11".

Which is why I predicts that once Trump finally crashes and burns, the Beltway media will do exactly what it did when the Bush Administration crashed and burned:  they will skip right over all those inconvenient Liberals who had been right about the coming debacle all along, they will anoint as brilliant prophets the likes of Bill Kristol, Eric Erickson, Joe Scarborough and any other Conservative who bailed on Trump in the 11th hour in order to back some other staggeringly-unfit wingnut, and they will embrace anyone, anywhere who will put on a suit, sit in front of a camera and speak the holy words -- "Both Sides were to blame" -- out loud.  

Unless we on the Left push back loud and hard and in one voice, sooner than you will believe possible you will wake up to find that the same Conservative goblins who have already crippled this country almost beyond repair have monetize yet another disaster of their own making, exiled fact-based reporting, causality and linear from the media entirely and used their craven Beltway collaborators to seal the deal.  

*For example, at the exact moment I am writing this, Mrs. Alan Greenspan is on MSNBC helping  notoriously unhinged gorgon, Ann Coulter, pimp her shitpile of a book(s) under the cover of a serious discussion about immigration.

I'm coming up on MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell at noon!

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) August 29, 2016